Culture Briefs

Mom’s pleasures

“Does the feminist approach ignore many women’s desire to care for their children? …

“Full-time motherhood, [psychologist Daphne] de Marneffe writes, is often framed in terms of female self-sacrifice — but such rhetoric ignores the pleasures of this way of life. ’There is the sensual, physical pleasure of caring for small children; the satisfaction of spending most of our waking hours … with the people we love the most, taking care of their needs.’ …

“De Marneffe, a mother of three, herself temporarily left her clinical practice when she realized that she was too torn between the demands of her profession and the need to mother her children. … She does not downplay many women’s need for professional accomplishment or their struggle to maintain an individuality separate from motherhood. But she also challenges the idea that only work outside the family is ’real work.’ …

“’Many people,’ writes de Marneffe, ’would rather put their money toward funding their own “high quality” care of their children than toward a publicly funded system.’ This simple fact, not the desire to keep women down or mistrust of government, is the primary reason for the lack of subsidized day care.”

—Cathy Young, writing on “Cool Mom,” April 12 in Reason Online at www.reason.com

Dying Europe

“Two years ago, Pat Buchanan published an apocalyptic book titled ’The Death of the West,’ prophesying that declining European fertility and immigration from Muslim countries could turn ’the cradle of Western civilization’ into ’its grave.’ …

“[T]he continent is experiencing fundamental demographic and cultural changes whose long-term consequences no one can foresee.

“To begin with, consider the extraordinary prospect of European demographic decline. A hundred years ago … the countries that make up today’s European Union accounted for around 14 percent of the world’s population. Today that figure is down to around 6 percent, and by 2050, according to a United Nations forecast, it will be just over 4 percent. … Even allowing for immigration, the United Nations projects that the population of the current European Union members will fall by around 7.5 million over the next 45 years.”

—Niall Ferguson, writing on “Eurabia?” April 4 in the New York Times

PC tyranny

“Chairman Mao, with his sundry campaigns to ’re-educate’ and raise the consciousness of a recalcitrant populace, offers a classic example of political correctness in action. Add to those efforts the linguistic innovations that George Orwell described in the afterword to ’1984’ as ’Newspeak’ and you have limned the basic features of political correctness. The purpose of Newspeak, Orwell wrote, was to make ’a heretical thought … literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.’ …

“Just so, the politically correct of our own day seek to bring about a moral revolution by changing the way we speak and write about the world: a change of heart instigated and embodied by a change of language. Examples are legion. We are told to scrap the phrase ’learning disabilities’ and replace it with ’learning differences.’ The announced hope is that little Johnny … will not feel stigmatized; the secret hope is that by refusing to speak the truth, we can change the truth. The BBC tells its employees that they must use the word ’partner’ when referring to their wife or husband, since using ’wife’ and ’husband’ might seem to imply that the married state was somehow preferable to other possible modes of sexual cohabitation.”

—Roger Kimball, writing on “Political Correctness,” in the Winter issue of the National Interest